Gordon Ramsay: On Top of the World

Best known as the host of Fox's Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay is one of the most driven, successful, and irate chefs around. He has thrown Hollywood actresses out of his restaurants and is notorious for his anger, but his food has been served to numerous heads of state, and he is one of only three chefs in England whose restaurant is rated at three Michelin stars. Sometimes hilarious and frequently heartbreaking, this is Gordon Ramsay’s full life, from tenements and poverty to top-notch restaurants and fame.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Gordon Ramsay on TV. Yes he is a foul-mouthed politically incorrect man, but I admire his ability as one of the world’s top chefs and never get tired of his antics. This book tells the story of how he came from a struggling family plagued by his abusive alcoholic father and drug-addicted brother to his place as one of the greatest chefs of his generation.

The book is actually quite hilarious. It is riddled with Ramsay’s F-bombs and unique insults as he tells of his escapades in climbing to the top of the catering world. It also has its sad points as well. If most people understood the life Ramsay had as a child, perhaps they would understand why he is so hot-tempered and driven. They may not like him, but they might understand him better. Not to say that this gives Ramsay a free pass. He has done questionable things through his life and career, but he makes no excuses.

Aspel’s narration is very good and he reads with the vigor required for the biography of such a volatile expletive-uttering man. This is a must for any Ramsay fan. Give it a go. You’ll get a laugh at the least.

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation

A mesmerizing, behind-the-scenes business thriller that chronicles how Sega, a small, scrappy gaming company led by an unlikely visionary and a team of rebels, took on the juggernaut Nintendo and revolutionized the video-game industry. In 1990, Nintendo had a virtual monopoly on the video-game industry. Sega, on the other hand, was just a faltering arcade company with big aspirations and even bigger personalities. But all that would change with the arrival of Tom Kalinske, a former Mattel executive who knew nothing about video games and everything about fighting uphill battles.

Being a staunch Nintendo kid from way back, I was eager to hear this tale. Although I would have preferred a detailed recount of Nintendo’s rise to power instead of Sega, the book still tells of Nintendo’s history. It just doesn’t go into as much of the inner workings as it does with Sega.

The story is told through a lot of re-enacted scenes and the author seems to have taken a lot of liberty with dialogue that can be overly dramatic at times, but the story is a fun listen. I was surprised by how little I knew of just how much Sega rattled Nintendo back in the 90s. I even found myself cheering on Sega (much to my inner child’s horror). The inclusion of Sony and the rise of the Playstation was also a great story.

The narration is good. However it did grate on my nerves that the narrator pronounced the Super Nintendo’s acronym as S.N.E.S., rather than saying “Sness”, as it was and still is pronounced by many gamers. But he narrates the book very well.

Gamers need to hear this story. It tells of the story of one of the greatest rivalries in consumer history. The battle was relatively short, but it definitely did define a generation.

The Night Eternal

The night belongs to them, and it will be a night eternal… After the blasts, it was all over. Nuclear Winter has settled upon the earth. Except for one hour of sunlight a day, the whole world is plunged into darkness. It is a near-perfect environment for vampires. They have won. It is their time. Almost every single man, woman and child has been enslaved in vast camps across the globe. Like animals, they are farmed, harvested for the sick pleasure of the Master Race.

The Night Eternal rounds out a great trilogy. Set two years after the previous book, the world is now in the iron grip of the Master. The nuclear blasts that destroyed the other Ancients have cast darkness over the earth. It's a new world order where humans are harvested for blood in concentration camps and only a few still fight for a seemingly hopeless cause.

The most interesting parts of the book are the revelation of the Masters' true origin and the story of Mr Quinlan. Be warned that the story does take a bit of a religious turn, breaking away from the hard reality-ground logic of the first two books. But this adds strength and mystique to the story.

The narrator does a good job of bringing the characters to some sense of life. His range isn't always the best, but it's a better effort than Ron Perlman. I thoroughly enjoyed this conclusion to the series and am sorry to see it end, but it ends very neatly and every story thread is tied up.

The Strain

The visionary creator of the Academy Award-winning Pan's Labyrinth and a Hammett Award-winning author bring their imaginations to this bold, epic novel about a horrifying battle between man and vampire that threatens all humanity. It is the first installment in a thrilling trilogy and an extraordinary international publishing event.

Hogan and Del Toro have done a worthy job of bringing the mythical vampire back to its darker roots. This novel laughs in the face of teen stories involving beautiful vampires as objects of lust (yes Twilight, I'm looking at your pathetic crap).

The Strain explores the vampire myth from a virology point of view. Vampirism is presented wholly as a parasitic disease. It blends elements of the zombie and vampire myths together. It's a somewhat new take on the genre and the story moves along mostly well, except for some repetition of how scenes play out when the strain breaks out. The exposition is great, and the inclusion of the "Masters" - seven mysterious elder vampires from which the strain is born - is very intriguing.

I will agree with most people and say that Perlman's narration is mostly flat and lacking any punch and conviction. However it wasn't a book-ruining experience for me. I like him as an actor and found his deep voice moved the story along well. I've heard far worse.

I'll definitely be picking up the next book and am also eagerly awaiting the TV series.

Sandakan: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches

This is the story of the three-year ordeal of the Sandakan prisoners of war - a barely known episode of unimaginable horror. After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors transferred 2700 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp some eight miles inland of Sandakan, on the east coast of North Borneo. For decades after the Second World War, the Australian and British governments would refuse to divulge what happened here, for fear of traumatising the families of the victims.

If history has taught us anything, it is that the past should never be forgotten. To his credit, Paul Ham has brought the story of the Sandakan POW camp and death marches back into the public eye. I personally did not know such a travesty occurred to our Australian and British diggers and I found it very informative.

Many people may be vaguely aware of the horrific conditions and cruelty suffered by prisoners at the hands of Japanese forces during WWII, but even I wasn't aware of just how far the depravity went until I heard this story. Over 2200 prisoners passed through the Sandakan POW camp. 1500 were killed on the forced death march near the end of the war, many murdered for being too weak from sickness and exhaustion to continue on. The rest died in and around the camp from disease, torture and from being forcibly worked to death. Of the 1500 marched to death, only 6 survived. Combined with the losses suffered at the camp, it was a death rate of 99.8%.

The story is told in all of its shocking detail in Ham's book. Eyewitness accounts from surviving prisoners, guards and natives make for a disturbing telling. I was moved to tears a number of times during the book. It is so important that these events are never forgotten. For as George Santayana said: those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel

It is a tale of ghosts, of madness, of revenge - of old alliances giving way to new intrigues. Denmark is changing, shaking off its medieval past. War with Norway is on the horizon. And Hamlet - son of the old king, nephew of the new - becomes increasingly entangled in a web of deception - and murder. Beautifully performed by actor Richard Armitage ("Thorin Oakenshield" in the Hobbit films), Hamlet, Prince of Denmark takes Shakespeare’s original into unexpected realms, reinventing a story we thought we knew.

Having never read or studied Hamlet in school, but having read (and enjoyed) “Macbeth: A Novel”, I was more than willing to get my first taste of Hamlet from this novelized version. Like Macbeth before it, the authors have stripped away all of Shakespeare’s poetic language and focus on telling the gritty story in a way that is accessible to both fans and non-fans alike.

The characters have deep personalities and are brought to life in a superb and faultless performance by Richard Armitage. Some changes have been made and elements added by the authors, but be assured that the writers have thoroughly researched all the history behind the story and these new additions do not detract from the tale in any way.

For the uninitiated, the story follows Hamlet, prince of Denmark as he seeks to uncover the truth behind the murder of his father the King by his Uncle Claudius. What follows is a tale of madness, murder and revenge as Hamlet carves a bloody path to his final confrontation with Claudius.

This book a must for any listener who wants the full story of Hamlet without the poetic drivel.

Skin Game: The Dresden Files

Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day. As Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it's something awful. This time, it's worse than that. Mab's involved Harry in a smash-and-grab heist run by one of his most despised enemies, to recover the literal Holy Grail from the vaults of the greatest treasure horde in the world - which belongs to the one and only Hades, Lord of the Underworld.

Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only wizard-for-hire and Knight of the Winter Court is back for more supernatural action. This time he is called upon by Queen Mab to assist in breaking into the most heavily fortified vault in existence: the personal vault of Hades, Lord of the Underworld. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Harry must ally himself with Nicodemus and the Denarians in the heist, courtesy of a debt required to be repayed by Mab to the fallen angel.

The story starts slower than is usual for the series, with a lot of character introductions and planning of the heist. It isn’t until the last third of the book that the mayhem the series is known for breaks out, and once we get there it is worth the ride. Harry is as wise-cracking in his smartassery as always and we even see the return of an old friend to watch his back.

Marsters is back to narrate again and does a steller job as always. He is hands down one of the best in the business and his personality lends every character a lot of weight. But he really shines when voicing Dresden. His voice has just the right tone to convey every nuance of the character. Now the arduous wait for the next novel begins…

The Cardinal of the Kremlin: Jack Ryan, Book 4

In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night. Between the USA and the Soviet Union, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first missile defense system, and no one knows that more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviet's capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army's new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair. Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first?

This is my first foray into a Tom Clancy novel. I love the films based on his books, but until now, never thought I had the patience to sit through the written work. This one is a great read in terms of characters and story.

The major story centres around Cardinal, a Soviet double agent working to sneak secrets out of Russia to the CIA. There is also a plot that sees the USA and the USSR racing to complete their versions of a laser defence system. There are a lot of characters in the book, but they are all fully fleshed out and realised. Surprisingly, Jack Ryan himself takes a backseat for much of the story. As the title suggests, the book focuses a lot on Cardinal, and luckily he is a very likable character.

Now to the narration. One of the reasons I was hesitant to listen to the audio versions was that I had heard that Michael Prichard's narration was flat and boring. It is to an extent, but it wasn't bad enough that I had to stop listening. He doesn't have any range as a actor for different characters and when he does try to do different voices, he seems to just give up after about one sentence. The book would definitely have been better with an actual voice actor, but it was tolerable.

Bag of Bones

When bestselling crime writer Mike Noonan's wife dies, he suffers from writer's block. Until he is drawn from Derry to his lakeside retreat, Sara Laughs, a house once inhabited by a famous singer. It's a community run by rich, tyrannical, wheelchair-bound Devore and his terrifying, skeletal, female bookkeeper. Devore is hell-bent on getting custody of his grandchild. Three-year-old Kyra and her young mother, Mattie, turn to Mike for help, and Mike, besotted by Mattie, is powerless to resist.

I bought this book under the impression that it was about a troubled widower with writer's block who moves to his lakeside retreat, only to find it haunted by malicious ghosts. While this is partly true, the story focuses more on the main character's interaction with a single mother trying to protect her daughter from her evil custody-seeking father-in-law. The ghost stuff takes more of a backseat to this other storyline. Eventually the two parts unite to show that they were all part of the same story anyway, but it still felt like a cop out.

I wasn't looking forward to Stephen King's narration. After listening to him speak in the afterword of his other books, he sounded too much like he was reading from the page. Not natural enough. However I enjoyed his reading of this book more than I expected to. While he is not as good as other readers (I think anyone could have done a better job), I found I wasn't as distracted as I thought I would be. He lends good nuances to some of the characters and isn't too bad.

The book is a mediocre read in the grand scheme of King's other work. If you're planning to listen, make sure you know what you're getting into.

Doctor Sleep

Stephen King says he wanted to know what happened to Danny Torrance, the boy at the heart of The Shining, after his terrible experience in the Overlook Hotel. The instantly riveting Doctor Sleep picks up the story of the now middle-aged Dan, working at a hospice in rural New Hampshire, and the very special 12-year old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

Doctor Sleep’s story follows Danny Torrance – the special boy who survived his father’s murderous possession by the Overlook Hotel twenty years ago – living a nomad’s life as he moves from place to place, wrestling with an alcohol problem that he uses to dull the effects of the Shining. His ability has become more powerful over the years and the demons from his childhood still haunt his waking hours and his nightmares.

King has managed to take the idea of the Shining and develop it in ways not before thought of. We encounter characters who have a fair bit of “shine” that manifests itself as different abilities. Some of these characters are good, some are evil. The latter includes the True Knot; semi-immortals who were once human, but are no longer. They survive by feeding off the “Steam” that children with the Shining produce when they are tortured to death. Of course, Danny inevitably crosses paths with them as he seeks to save a powerful child from their insane obsession. It’s a good story. Nothing wrong with it at all. It just doesn’t stand out from King’s earlier works.

As to the narration, I’ve only ever seen Will Patton in movies and was a little sceptical as to his selection as the story’s narrator. I haven’t ever seen much acting range from the man. I was wrong. Patton brings each character to life in a performance that I wouldn’t have believed possible from the understated actor. He is brilliant.

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